LA Unified will eliminate $43 million in administrative salaries as part of an emergency cost-cutting plan to stave off its fiscal overseers. The cuts won’t be at school sites this year, but rather at the central and local district offices. The number of jobs that will be lost will be left up to each department,...

LA Unified board members were jolted last month when a top county official showed up unannounced to say, You’re spending more money than you make and the savings you’ve been living off of are about to run out. It got worse this Tuesday, when she came back and brought a top state official with the...

*Updated Aug. 27 As night drew near last Tuesday, after a drawn-out and divisive four-hour debate on how to replace a disgraced board member, a bombshell was dropped at school board members’ feet. District finances are of such great concern that the Los Angeles County Office of Education’s chief financial officer showed up unannounced to...

*Updated Aug. 23 Families whose children attend schools in LA Unified’s Board District 5, in southeast and northeast Los Angeles, will get to elect a new representative in a special election on March 5. That’s what the school board on Tuesday decided to do with the seat that has been vacant since Ref Rodríguez stepped...

Nearly 100,000 Los Angeles students are heading back to school without an elected representative because of the empty LA Unified school board seat in District 5. The District 5 seat — one of seven in the district, each with its own elected board member — was held by Ref Rodríguez, who pleaded guilty to money-laundering...

*Updated July 26 The ouster of Los Angeles Unified School District board member Ref Rodriguez — who resigned Monday after pleading guilty to money-laundering charges — means the remaining board members must now decide when and how to replace him. They have 60 days to decide a path forward, and the clock is ticking. Right...

It’s official: Los Angeles Unified’s Ref Rodriguez is out. Early Monday, the embattled school board member pleaded guilty to a felony count of conspiracy and four misdemeanor counts for making campaign contributions in another person’s name. As part of a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to immediately resign from office. Rodriguez won’t serve any jail...

*UPDATED In his first interview after declaring victory in the LA Unified school board election, Nick Melvoin vowed to protect parents’ choices in education and to move the district beyond the charter school versus traditional school narrative. “I would like the first thing we try to tackle to be moving beyond this what we call...

Nearly 1,600 LA Unified administrators will be notified in mid-March that their contracts may end in June. But is this attempt at bringing administrative staff more in line with the declining number of students too late to help a looming budget deficit, as some school board members fear? Or will there even be a staff reduction?...